The Pawtuxet River, also known as the Pawtuxet River Main Stem and the Lower Pawtuxet, is a river in the U.S. state of Rhode Island. It flows 12.3 miles (19.8 km) and empties into the upper Narragansett Bay of the Atlantic Ocean. Together with its two main tributary branches, the North Branch Pawtuxet River and the South Branch Pawtuxet River, it drains a watershed of 231.6 square miles (600 km2), all of which is in the state of R.I.
Original home of the Fruit of the Loom Company on the Pawtuxet River at Pontiac Village Warwick
Pawtuxet River, 1886 engraving.
Samuel Gorton (1593–1677) was an early settler and civic leader of the Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations and President of the towns of Providence and Warwick. He had strong religious beliefs which differed from Puritan theology and was very outspoken, and he became the leader of a small sect known as Gortonians, Gortonists, or Gortonites. As a result, he was frequently in trouble with the civil and church authorities in the New England colonies.
Samuel Gorton governor's medallion
19th century depiction of Gorton on trial in Portsmouth
Attack on Shawomet by soldiers from Massachusetts in 1643 from a 19th-century history of the United States
Warwick was destroyed in 1676 during King Philip's War.